Hello List, In my extracurricular studies, I have been reading Kolb's "An Introduction to Brain and Behavior" (2e, 2005), specifically the opening chapter on the origins of the feedback loop between brain and behavior, and the dramatic impact that small lesions throughout the brain have on ones behavior.
This is relevant to a number of discussions on this list (to my mind/brain) as it seems to create some rather severe constraints surrounding the success criteria of a "duplication" of a brain. >From the reading, it would appear that, in order to a proper digital duplication of a brain to take place, the so-called "substitution level" at which you would be willing to say "Yes doctor" would actually have to be satisfied at multiple levels of analysis (i.e. chemically, neurochemically, biologically, physically, socially, psychologically, interpersonally). These levels of analysis are not captured in any complete mathematical formalism that I know of. A doctor intending to "duplicate your brain" would have to plan on a) copying your brain in a current state (statically + dynamic equations to fill in details of "next state" operation; b) destroying some or all parts of your brain to be replaced/duplicated; c) reconstituting your brain (in either the biological way (probably absolutely intractable) or some sufficiently digitally exact copy (today, practically intractable) such that it replicated the function of what was to be replaced/duplicated. This would have to be perfect enough to keep all of the levels of substitution/analysis described above in tact. We know from even seemingly minor cases of brain damage that the "person" before the damage (i.e. YOU) and the "person" after the damage (YOU?) are not the same... memories are fragmented, behavioral patterns change, and significant others who would previously have enjoyed YOUR company might now be frustrated when spending time with YOU. So would you ever say yes to the doctor? Why? What kind of confidence would you need to be willing to bet such a duplication/replacement would be successful? I submit that your confidence would (and should) be quite low. This is because a) there could be more than one substitution level; b) dynamical properties of the brain are just as important (if not more) as their general static properties (eg. the connectome); c) intersubjective agreement about whether you are the same person is just as (if not more) important after duplication, as it is assumed after the duplication that you will go on to join society in whatever capacity you did before the duplication. My computer earlier today wouldn't boot up. Apparently, one of the key files it needed got corrupted and I needed to replace it using a restore disk. It took about an hour to fix. This is for an actual full fledged honest-to-goodness digital machine. And its failure was completely unpredictable based on previous behavior of the machine.Either a) I did something in my previous session to cause the corruption or b) the corruption happened randomly. What about something as complex (and integrated into its environment) as the brain? What could go wrong in a duplication here? TL;DR CONCLUSIONS -- 1) Thought experiments about the completion of duplications/destructions of brains gloss over so many necessary empirical details regarding brain function and continual identity that they can come to no useful conclusions about anything. 2) "Mechanism" as used on this list (i.e. the computational hypothesis that our minds can (and indeed are) replicated in the structure of the natural numbers is FALSE. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/52ccb121-42bb-404b-81fa-361c1efaaf6c%40googlegroups.com.
